Various devices such as computers, tablets and hand-held devices (e.g., such as mobile telephones and smart phones) are used at a rapidly increasing pace to access magazine media including, for example, electronically-readable collections of articles which have been traditionally published in paper form. Some of the companies offering such electronic magazine media include, for example, Next Issue Media (NIM, or Texture) and Magzter. These and other companies provide user interfaces, typically on a subscription basis, which permit a user to access any of a multitude of different magazine issues. These types of services have been characterized in reviews as effectively Netflix for magazines, with each such service providing access to many thousands of magazine issues. With over a dozen articles often included in each magazine issue, facilitating a reader's preference to specific articles or magazine issues of interest can be an overwhelming task.
Unlike other electronically reviewable media services such as Netflix, electronic magazine services can be challenging to implement with features that are desirable for a variety of uses. Innate to the industry, specific magazine articles lack comparable third-party reviews that might lead a potential reader to consider reviewing the article and/or the magazine issue in which it is published. This is in contrast to a new movie or YouTube video which will typically be linked to third-party electronically-readable reviews which provide generic ratings or genre-specific ratings (e.g., four stars out of five, now trending, and a count of the number of views).
Also somewhat innate to the electronic magazine industry, the text-based form of articles published in magazine issues can be limiting from an interactive perspective. With so many different articles available to the potential reader and with the substance of each article somewhat buried inside each of these different articles, the electronic-magazine service provider is burdened to find a way to direct and maintain the reader's interest to each magazine issue and/or article inside the magazine issue sufficiently long so that the reader can capture this substance and experience benefit from the invested reading time.
It can also be challenging for electronic-magazine service providers to generate and provide access to each magazine issue in a timely manner. Consider, for example, an electronic-magazine service provider needing both to draw attention to a forthcoming magazine issue while also needing to pull together and properly format article metadata necessary to permit electronic access on behalf of many potential readers. This magazine metadata is often received by the electronic-magazine service provider in a form which includes both text and artwork and which needs to be preserved so as to maintain correspondence to hard-copy versions of the tangibly-distributed magazines. Unlike other electronically-reviewable video media services, information regarding forthcoming yet-to-published magazine issues (electronic or otherwise), as may be useful for drawing attention to potential readers, is generally limited. Without such comparable efforts to draw attention, distribution revenue can be insufficient to recapture publication costs.
These and other issues have presented challenges to content access for generating interest in electronic magazine articles/issues and the related services behind the generation and distribution of this type of media.